The hacking, which is being called “one of the most significant security breaches in recent years,” occurred in 2015, but wasn’t recognized until Spring 2016. It is the first known case of Russians using the popular antivirus Kaspersky software to hack U.S. national security information. Officials, however, have worried that Russians would exploit the software for their gain in such a matter, and some have accused the company, founded by a computer scientist who was trained at a KGB-sponsored technical school, of being a proxy of the Russian government.

The aid programs are so mismanaged that some U.S. dollars are going to benefit Iraqis who took over areas that persecuted Christians fled even though the U.N. says the project is aimed at helping Christians, the lawyers said.

Later:

Far worse, Rasche said, is that UNDP [United Nations’ Development Program] reports claim that work projects in the town of Telkayf were directed to assist religious minority communities, but there are no remaining Christians there.

Congressman Mark Meadows, chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, is really naive.

You see, when all Republicans running for office ran incessant ads during the past four election cycles promising to fully repeal Obamacare, Meadows actually thought they meant it! What a fool.

Later:

Meadows, along with a few of his compatriots, didn’t seem to get the memo: that this was all a joke. Who do they think they are? Amelia Bedelia? Doesn’t he know they only meant to repeal the funding mechanism of Obamacare to make it more insolvent?

Just think of Afghanistan, or Syria or Africa or Indonesia or the Philippines – the list goes on and on – each place where America went to bind up the wounds of war, help after a natural disaster, treat people for illnesses and more.

Do not listen to those who say that America needs to withdraw from the world because all we get is criticism for the good we do.

Now is not the time to withdraw from the world, but to love, support and build a hurting and needy world that simply needs to know there is hope.

Police arrested hundreds of protesters across Russia, including opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Thousands of people turned out to demonstrate against corruption, the largest such protests since 2012. The protests were sparked by a film produced by Navalny that claims Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has made out like a bandit while in office.

Like this:

Rob Natelson researched the history of a convention of states that happened in 1889. Several states sent representatives to a meeting in St. Louis, where they discussed what to do about Chicago meat packing companies that were driving down the prices paid to western and midwestern beef and pork ranchers. The way the states called and conducted the meeting was similar to previous conventions of states, and future conventions should operate along the same lines.

I have disagreed with Senator Ron Wyden on practically every political question there is, but he always has struck me as a decent and honest man, and so it is with a heavy heart that I write these words: Senator Wyden must resign his seat in light of disturbing new information about his past that has come to light.

The shocking revelation: Senator Wyden has been, for more than a decade, a willing accomplice to a plot to undermine the American political order and to overthrow the Constitution by infiltrating agents of radicalism into the highest reaches of the federal judiciary.

The nefariousness of this undertaking cannot be overstated. The monsters advanced to positions of power with Senator Wyden’s assistance include dangerous extremists whose ideology “represents a breathtaking retreat from the notion that Americans have fundamental Constitutional rights.” His agents take “a very dangerous view to our liberty” that “harkens back to the days when politicians restricted a people’s rights on a whim.”

Wyden’s anti-constitutional conspiracy “is couched in the sort of jurisprudence that justified the horrific oppression of one group after another in our first two centuries.”

The Trump administration wants to refocus the “Countering Violent Extremism” program on radical Islam. The program is supposed to “deter groups or potential lone attackers through community partnerships and educational programs or counter-messaging campaigns,” and targets people within U.S. borders. The Obama administration released payments for this program in its final days, but it looks like the Trump administration will stop those payments and redirect the money. I’m waiting for the mainstream media to criticize the Trump administration for ignoring the threat of rampaging Baptists.

No my dear duopolists you are not entitled to my vote. The fact that you have locked yourself into a binary understanding of the world does not obligate me to do the same. If you would like my vote, I am willing to be convinced and open to new ideas. You may EARN my vote and are welcome to try and re-earn it every single election. It is not yours by default to lose.

This may sound like some far off, minor election event which is far removed from American concerns, but when you consider our global position with the Chinese this story is nothing short of horrifying. The residents of Hong Kong held an election, the results of which don’t appear to be in dispute. But Beijing stepped in when they didn’t approve of the outcome and essentially nullified it. That would be the equivalent of the White House barring a new congressman from taking their seat in Washington because they’d been critical of the President. When protesters took to the street to voice their displeasure they were pepper sprayed and beaten with police batons. That’s not democracy.. it’s the mark of an iron fisted tyrant.

The desired result in this election has not necessarily been the presidency of Donald Trump. In fact, he seems to them to be rather disposable. The mission is sowing disruption, chaos. And in doing that, Putin will have accomplished something for himself, regardless of who wins next week: a deeply fractured American system, once held up as a shining alternative to Moscow’s style of power, now tarnished beyond recognition.

Later:

“If Trump wins, of course they’ll drink champagne in the Kremlin, but not for long,” says former Putin advisor and political analyst Gleb Pavlovsky. “Then they’ll realize that nothing is resolved and that the election of Trump will lead to more chaos. But that’s what we’re selling — chaos.”

Russia is helping Trump’s campaign, yes, but it is not doing so solely or even necessarily with the goal of placing him in the Oval Office. Rather, these efforts seek to produce a divided electorate and a president with no clear mandate to govern. The ultimate objective is to diminish and tarnish American democracy. Unfortunately, that effort is going very well indeed.

Self-dealing is, for instance, at the heart of our primary- and secondary-education crisis, as schools and districts are run in the interests of administrators and tenured teachers rather than students. It is a driving force behind our higher-education dilemmas, as the already accredited run the accreditation system and keep out new competitors and new models of schooling and financing. It undermines upward mobility, as established players in one industry after another use licensing and certification requirements to keep out competitors. It distorts our immigration debate, as the national interest and the interests of powerful employers are willfully confounded. It is a primary barrier to market-oriented health-care reform.

For all these reasons, cronyism also leaves the public mistrustful of conservative claims to offer solutions on these various fronts, and of conservative assertions that the competitive provision of public services or benefits could help the poor, elderly, and vulnerable better than today’s welfare and entitlement systems. Cronyism thus lies at the heart of our liberal welfare state and is a massive overarching problem for conservative reformers.

Indeed, corporatism, or the consolidation of social power in the hands of large, centralized public and private institutions, is a core principle of modern progressivism, such that picking winners and losers has long been understood by many on the left to be a necessary purpose of public policy. “In economic warfare,” wrote the progressive theorist Herbert Croly in 1909, “the fighting can never be fair for long, and it is the business of the state to see that its own friends are victorious.”

Cronyist progressivism is thus coherently wrong. But cronyist conservatism is incoherent and inexcusable. And leaving the public with a choice between only these two alternatives, as our politics too often does, is a failure of our political system that is again attributable to a failure of the defenders of the market economy and of American democratic capitalism.